David Lawrence Smith

This readable history fills a gap in the field by providing an overview of parliamentary history in the period as well as a synthesis of current research on the subject. In the process, the book transcends partisan positions and suggests an organic approach that integrates parliamentary history into the wider processes of politics and government

This is a survey of a seminal and intensely controversial period in British history, from the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 to the union of the Kingdoms in 1707. The book explores the intersecting histories of the Stuart monarchies and considers how events in each nation were shaped by being part of a multiple kingdom as well as by their own internal dynamics. Throughout, special attention is given to the personalities and political style of successive rulers. Their role in precipitating two revolutions is examined against the background of longer term constitutional, religious and social themes. In particular, the parallels between James I and Charles II, and between Charles I and James II, are clearly drawn out. -- Publisher's website.

"This volume ranges widely across the social, religious and political history of revolution in seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland, from contemporary responses to the outbreak of war to the critique of the post-regicidal regimes; from royalist counsels to Lilburne's politics; and across the three Stuart kingdoms. However, all the essays engage with a central issue - the ways in which individuals experienced the crises of mid seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland and what that tells us about the nature of the Revolution as a whole. Responding in particular to three influential lines of interpretation - local, religious and British - the contributors, all leading specialists in the field, demonstrate that to comprehend the causes, trajectory and consequences of the Revolution we must understand it as a human and dynamic experience, as a process. This volume reveals how the understanding of these personal experiences can provide the basis on which to build up larger frameworks of interpretation"-- "When John Morrill began his research career the most influential writing about mid-seventeenth-century England was essentially concerned with modernization, and, even in non-Marxist explanations, contained a strong strain of materialism. This was a prominent feature of the sometimes vituperative exchanges of the gentry debate, and John's first piece of extended writing about seventeenth-century England was written in response to that controversy; it was a long essay, composed during a summer vacation, which examined the relationship between the fortunes of particular gentry families and their Civil War allegiance. His interest in local realities, however, quickly gave rise to dissatisfaction with the broad categories of analysis with which the gentry controversy was engaged. By the time that he published the monograph based on his Oxford D.Phil. thesis, in 1974, he concluded (among other things) that 'the particular situation in Cheshire diffracted the conflicts between King and Parliament into an individual and specific pattern. As a result all rigid, generalized explanations, particularly of the socio-economic kind, are unhelpful if not downright misleading.' A desire to do better than these generalizations has driven his work ever since, and has thereby provided a huge stimulus to scholars of early modern England. His doctoral study of Cheshire marked the beginning of the first of three overlapping but distinct phases in the development of his work, in each of which he has been a leading figure. All have been a point of reference for the work of numerous scholars engaged in a critical reappraisal of the Whig and Marxist traditions. In his first phase, as a local historian"--

'Constitutional Royalism' is one of the most familiar yet least often examined of all the political labels found in the historiography of the English Revolution. This book fills a gap by investigating the leading Constitutional Royalists who rallied to King Charles I in 1642 while consistently urging him to reach an 'accommodation' with Parliament. These Royalists' early careers reveal that a commitment to the rule of law and a relative lack of 'godly' zeal were the characteristic predictors of Constitutional Royalism in the Civil War. Such attitudes explain why many of them criticised the policies of the King's personal rule, but also why they joined the King in 1642 and tried to achieve a negotiated settlement thereafter. The central chapters examine their role in the peace talks of the 1640s and assess why those talks broke down. The final part of the book traces the Constitutional Royalists through the Interregnum - during which they consciously withdrew from public life - to the Restoration, when many of them returned to prominence and saw their ideas vindicated. A concluding chapter reviews the long-term legacy of Constitutional Royalism and its specific contribution to the politics of the English Revolution. Throughout, the story of the Constitutional Royalists is set within the wider context of seventeenth-century English political history and thought.